US President Barack Obama speaks on the economy at Knox College, 24 July, in Galesburg, Illinois. Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

Republicans seized upon Obama's speech on the economy as a chance to reiterate their contention that very little about the nation's situation has changed in the past five years – and, paradoxically, there's very little Obama could do about it, even if he wanted to.

"The president himself said [the speech] isn't going to change any minds," John Boehner said in a floor speech before Obama even started. "All right, well. So exactly what will change? What's the point? What's it going to accomplish? You probably got the answer: nothing."

Of course, inertia – in both the political and economic sense – was a major theme of the speech itself. Obama started off with some applause-worthy boosterism: the country leads in technological advances! We manufacture a lot of stuff!

But the crux of the speech was less optimistic: the existing trends in "a winner-take-all economy where a few do better and better, while everybody else just treads water – have been made worse by the recession."

Obama's complaints about the parallel stagnation in Washington were familiar as well. He called out Republican obstructionism repeatedly, and in at least one unscripted and pointed assertion:

Repealing Obamacare and cutting spending is not an economic plan. It's not.

Your opinion as to whether the speech served its purpose depends on your party identification, and your opinion on what its purpose was probably does, too. For me, it's a split decision: I am sympathetic to the president's policies – using government spending as a lever to enable upward mobility – but I think he may not have succeeded in what most progressives probably thought was the purpose of the speech: to rally his base and frame a renewed economic policy debate over the coming months.

Maybe, I'm being too literal, but I keep getting stuck on the very title of the speech, "A Better Bargain for the Middle Class."

Here's the problem: the "middle class" – a once-reliable rallying point for both parties – is shrinking (not really news); and so are the numbers of Americans who think they are members of it. What used to be the case – Americans defined themselves as "middle class" even if they weren't – is starting to adjust to sad reality: Americans don't think of themselves as "middle class", because they're not.

A Pew study this spring found the number of Americans defining themselves as "middle class" has slipped from 53% to 49% since 2008, while those identifying themselves as "lower class" went from 25% to 32%. Actual class slippage mirrors this finding almost exactly: the 2011 census found that since 2007, the share of working families with an income less than double the federal poverty line (the government's definition of "low income") rose from 28% to 32%.

Referring to "the middle class" as a sympathetic totem, or even as an aspirational construct, now runs the risk of alienating voters as much as inspiring or comforting them. Offering "protections" to the middle class might even raise resentments: for a growing number of Americans, that means giving benefits to someone else.

It may be sometime before political rhetoric adjusts to these harsh realities. I hope that the economy turns around before it has to.